What prompted me to upgrade the system was that at some point I suddenly realized with a chill, that the hard drive I had used when building the old webserver was already about 7 years old… No, there were no signs of HD trouble, SMART data was ok etc., but I felt that I was pushing my luck with a HD that old!

So, when my workmate offered to sell his old workstation (Intel Core 2 instead of an AMD Athlon XP, quite an upgrade) very cheaply, I took the opportunity and started moving the site to the new hardware. At the same time I upgraded the disk system to RAID1, which system has already been in use on my workstation, and on the file/print-server in my LAN, for several years.

While the RAID system offers some level of protection against data loss, it is NOT, repeat NOT, a substitute for a properly working backup system. However… it has already saved me and my data twice!!!